Gridrunner Revolution Is Third-Eye Candy

Jeff Minter makes acid-kissed games — trippy bursts of color and sound, with gameplay mechanics that are just as oddball.

Minter’s latest games are expansions on classic shooter-game concepts like those first floated by Tempest and other abstract ’80s arcade games. Minter himself made twitchy arcade-style games back in the day, like the original Gridrunner for the Commodore computer in 1982. Gridrunner Revolution, released this week for the PC, is a boundary-pushing experiment that melds classic gameplay with intense psychedelic visuals.

Still images don’t do Gridrunner Revolution justice. The game is alive with color, rippling in rainbows across the screen as if a fabulous hole has been torn in the fabric of time and space. The overwhelming visual splendor of it all is backed by electronic beats that tie it to the seminal British acid house scene of the late ’80s. Tunes from Turbo Recordings artists Popov, DMX Crew and Mr. James Barth provide a dubby, clubby backbone that carries through the entire experience.

Punctuating the aural landscape are retro videogame bloops (stuff you’ll swear you’ve heard in an arcade way back when), vocal samples ripped from classic sci-fi shows and dusty sound effects like the dive klaxon of a submarine. Across all this, Minter inserts hundreds of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pop culture and nerd references in the on-screen text

There’s innovative gameplay stewing in this sensory masala. Gridrunner Revolution is, at heart, a classic arcade shooter. The instructions are clear about the game’s goals: “Shoot stuff. Collect sheep. Don’t die.” But the devil’s in the details. For all of the incoming enemies and visual distractions, Gridrunner Revolution rarely feels tense.

Perhaps it’s the steady musical background that’s so soothing. Or maybe the eye-candy obfuscation (much of it perfectly harmless to the player’s spacecraft) masks the looming danger. Either way, it’s easy to space out playing Gridrunner Revolution. And failure never feels all that tragic. It helps that the game is chopped up into bite-sized levels — each its own brief dance with danger.

With the mouse and its buttons, players swivel their ships through space, saving lost sheep and firing on enemies. Advanced scoring requires pounding a wandering sun until it goes supernova, then using the pull of the resulting black hole to curve your stream of multi-colored arrowheads into a pulsating knot of molten death.

Gridrunner Revolution should be played not for the paces it puts your thumbs through, but for the things it’ll do to your brain.